Our Mother Earth is no man’s property
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And just like that, Sun Dance was over. Most everyone had already gone, including the caravan back east, wasn’t time for my journey yet, though I still had no clue what was next. Harvey said that we could stay around as long as we needed, me and a few other water protectors, including the Erenbrooks, plus there was still half a Buffalo in the fridge.
Also a bunch of Flies in the cook shack. Some wanted to swat the swarm, but you already know my Fly harming policy. Here’s the thing - we are the reason they’re here, we create their niche, we create their food, we create the warming Earth that provides longer breeding seasons - this insectivasion is a manmade plague.
Maybe they’re here to cleanse the Earth of our waste, or of us, could certainly carry another plague, but with each kill we only make their offense stronger. We could just clean up after ourselves, in the cook shack, or the landfill, or the cattle ranch, or we could invest in a Fly strip company because they seem to be getting worse all over. And so are the limey Ticks. And the malaric Mosquitoes, who were only ever given the chance to breed once we invented crap to clutter our yard. Only with stagnant water collecting on and in stuff, and the standstill of manmade water features, was this tropical swamp creature given the space to baby boom.
It is Lakota tradition to upturn any buckets or containers before leaving them outside, I was told that this was for the water, we don’t want to block its natural flow, and when we find a rain filled pail, we gently pour it out right where it would have fallen. I love you water. And a convenient modern side effect to this old traditional way, is that Mosquitoes have nowhere to breed. I’m telling you, there’s something to this native oral tradition.
Just like the traditional conical dwelling, inherently built to live in a good way. Leaves minimal temporary footprint, it’s feng-shui’d for maximum energy efficiency, water naturally flows right around it, and it’s gonna kill way less animals than that log cabin will.
Killer house on the loose, run! Not a horror flick about diminishing forests or spraying for Termites, or concreting over anthills, though none would be an issue in a tipi. Nope, I’m talking about a B-movie about a great escape, or an attempt at least, but they all died. Oops, spoiler alert, it’s windows crashing. The un-understandable plate glass panels of invisible forcefield that claim the lives of bewildered Birds, or that imprison the Bees, and Flies, and Moths, and other bugs that we want in the house about as much as they want to be trapped behind this magic mirror.
Back at the farm, there had been a Wasp’s nest in the barn, and they couldn’t figure out how to escape with their instinctual itinerary, so they just paced and searched for a loophole in the system. And then they died.
Tipis don’t have windows and bugs don’t get trapped inside. There’s a door that they can come in if it’s open, but they can just fly out the round hole of sunlight up above, and there’s no power grid of incandescence to trick them into thinking they’d want to visit anyway, especially if the cast iron’s hot. In a square home of modern construction, windows offer us a piece of the great outdoors from the comfort of our couch, a window to a more fulfilling world. But in a tipi, you are a living part of that mystical great outdoors.
I know that I’ll never convince everyone to take up the tipi, but it is so right on so many levels, way healthier for all involved and just pretty darn tootin fun to live in. I know what you’re thinking, that’ll never be enough room for all my stuff, where will I put my five-room house’s worth of things that I might need sometime? And I definitely need an acre lot of grass to mow too, or else what will I have to do this weekend?
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This is so ridiculous. Eradicating natural food supplies to manicure a useless invasive. Inedible lawn grass is the most irrigated crop in america. At least you have them fenced in from taking over the world, but why not at least seed ‘your’ acre with the foods you already buy on the way to the home and garden store?
When you live in a tipi, the entire continent is your backyard, but the inside is just as vast once you’ve transcended the material. It’s better to pack light anyway, and it’s better not to settle between hard places, we are meant to be nomads. Some more than others, and some geographic locations support more seasons of survival, but not a soul on Earth is meant for permanence.
Our planet is a liquid. Her timeline is just too far outside of our minimal grasp to fathom, except that now she’s about to overflow. The Earth is in a constant state of flux, continents shifting and beaches eroding, it’s all natural, even without this mysterious heatwave of floodwaters, and even the dry land is an ever-shifting foundation, like sand dunes in the wind.
At least until we had the genius idea of building our unmovable beachfront condos, and then the beachfront naturally erodes as it moves out back. But we spent so much money to manage this vanishing vacation rental, so we’ll just pay our congressman to disrupt the oceanview ecology of two ecosystems, as we steal sand from another to rebuild our economic empire of weekly rent.
But had they lived in a tipi, or any form of mobile home, they could simply move it back a few feet when the tidal wave comes in. Or if your town has started flooding, you could just move to high ground instead of building a faulty levee. Or if it gets too cold in the snow, and if frozen pizza isn’t your desired menu, just pick up and head south for the winter. But that doesn’t work with the controlling arm of capitalism.
Private property. Take pride in your ownership of adulthood, create something to last long after you’re gone, build an empire, just another something to clutter the skyline as our never-ending expansion exceeds expectations. And it’s gonna take about thirty years of hard labor to pay it off, so good luck with that nomad thing on your two weeks of actually living each year.
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I understand that I’m an idealistic dreamer, I romanticize living in the old way, but that’s only because I’ve experienced its magic first hand. I personally crave this life, but I fully get that for my words to have an impact on the mainstream, I have to provide an alternative way of thinking that has some rooting in reality. It works for my path of misadventure, but a tipi is no place to raise a family, not enough room, not enough convenience, simply an impossible task to ever attempt. Sure, the Lakota did it, for like basically ever, but they were way tougher than we are, though we do have a secret weapon of water protector canon. I cannot accept a diagnosis of daydream, a colony resigned to believing they could never fit their busy schedule into a tipi way of life, not when I’ve personally known the most amazing family of seven who still had room to have me over for dinner.
We were getting pretty tight though, the kids and I constantly trading songs, they were far better than me, but that was no surprise. These little ones knew what was up. They cooked their own Buffalo bites on an open fire, they knew about the poisons of GMOs, they were more worldly than half the adults I know, though I do keep somewhat questionable company. In-between tipis, they travel in the bus, though that is only a recent addition to the family unit, and the most colonized that they have ever lived. And every time a child hits their head on a corner or touches the hard edge of the not-so-open wood stove, they exclaim that they miss living in a circle.
They used to live in a tipi community, way out in the middle of an untamed landscape, a circular village of like-minds living far outside of the boxes. They set up camp on the hill for the warm summer months, and when it got cold, they moved down into the warmer valley. Nomads. Real life tipi nomads. They didn’t migrate far, but their impermanence left ample room for nature to grow with them, not against them. And all of this actually happened in modern day america, at least until the dang liberals got involved.
So this conservancy group came through and gained control of the land, and they wanted to build an eco-village, then they met the already eco-ing village and professed their love for a community already living out their vision. And then a lawyer got involved. Money got involved. And the next thing they know, the land conservancy group kicks out this village already living a traditional life of harmony with their surrounding environment, so that they can build retreats for rich people to pretend that they are. The Erenbrook kids have their placentas buried in that land, it is home, the only one they have ever known, they are intimately connected to that forest, but american law clearly allows for rich white men to cold-heartedly displace tipi villages, it’s actually got a pretty strong precedent.
So they got the bus, packed everyone in with surprising amounts of wiggle room, and they hit the road - to Standing Rock - turns out that their magically manifested backstory is just as uncannily coincidental as the rest of us. Duh. They made tipis with peddle power at camp, and again here at Sun Dance, and it’s pretty inspiring to see the level of convenience they’ve managed without electricity, but even they have a hard time finding a place to live rent free. Even on the reservation.
They are constantly harassed about vacating what should be publicly available land, but in true water protector fashion, they don’t back down from a few police intimidation tactics. They speak up, challenge authority, and she will pull herself up on a rope into the center of the tipi, where it will now be an entire ordeal to evict a peaceful family with no actual grounds for illegal ejection. These people are my heroes.
But even here at Sun Dance, now that it’s over, Harvey only has the official say-so over the closest four acres, so he wanted us to move our camp, or else the BIA could come knocking any day, on his family land, generally allotted, dissected and fractionated. It was now illegal for their tipi to be set up where it was, atop a hill on an indian reservation.
They were used to this though. They’ve been on my way of viewing capitalism for longer than me. We all despise the destruction of dollars, but they hold a much more rational philosophy than I. They see it as a tool, like anything else on the bus, they use it when they need to, but otherwise it sits on a shelf, and the key is that they don’t exchange their lifeforce in pursuit of wealth. They just do what they are already doing, living the life they love - sewing tipis and giving them away, or playing music at farmers markets as they represent our family and spread Earthly love - and the money that comes in is simply a convenient byproduct. A side-effect of doing what feels right. But certainly not enough to pay rent.
He and I had so many deep conversations about our similarly extreme worldviews, extreme in their simplicity, and extreme in the necessary measures involved in fixing this extreme mess we’re in. I don’t think a new recruit in four years is gonna be enough to stop the mayhem machine, this is not a new problem we’re finding ourselves in, it’s simply coming to an inflated head of state really quickly these days. I liked his thought that as people become more virtual and less connected to actual society, they’ll slowly die off without procreating and that will be that. That’s more of a long-term plan, but he also had a very interesting concept for forcing the hand of capitalism and possibly toppling the whole system, and I think it might work. Rent strike.
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'Rent' - it literally means 'to tear apart.' Similarly eerie to 'mort-gage' and its root 'death-grip.' If agriculture was my arch-nemesis of redundancy, pushing our planet to produce for profit when she was already perfectly providing at capacity, then rent was his. As fundamentally dumb as having to pay for food sounds to me, it does somehow sound even more contrived to charge a person for a place to exist. Geez, what backwards kinda language was that one possible in? Definitely not one with vibrational roots in Unci Maka.
We exist on the living surface of our mother, we are components of our creator’s life cycle, we have the God-given right to live on her. Who are you to lay claim to a piece of our planet’s face? Fencing off a mowed acre of Earth to keep it away from the plants and animals that literally make up that exact piece of Earth. The bodies of their ancestors are the dirt under your feet, but their check didn’t clear the fence, so they were promptly evicted as new tenants were socially encouraged to become proud ‘property’ owners.
I dropped using the word ‘property’ from my vocabulary, I’ve said it less than I’ve touched money, and that was only in air quotes as I spoke against the concept. This was the easiest bit of colonial language for me to abandon, though now it irks me to no end to hear eco-conscious family members proclaim ownership, but I understand that this type of terminology is simply the way that we speak english. How else can you talk about a specific tract of land that you live upon?
I just say “the land”, or this parcel of land, or the land that you steward, or I like the Erenbrook’s phrasing - “the land that you hold title to.” Uh huh, that’s good, you can’t buy a piece of my living mother, no matter how many paper dollars you throw at her, but capital bank will be happy to sell you a different piece of paper, in exchange for your life savings of selling your soul. They claim that this piece of paper will authorize you to be in charge, just like they claimed the other paper scraps made them in charge, it’s just too bad that the fine print is in some language that has absolutely no authority over anything of this world. You do not own the land beneath your feet, but I can concede that you may own the manmade title paperwork that displays the invisible fence they’ve caged you into, sure hope it’s worth all that hard labor though.
I simply can’t condone writing-off another’s life as an investment in a high-risk future. I was referring to our living planet, and her living organismic experience, but even the supreme beings of Godly image get taken hostage by the indenturing ideology of ownership. Even before ‘rent’ really, back when you could just set up a shop in indian country, and even if you managed to live completely off the land, you still had to answer to the tax man.
But ‘owning’ your home is one of the most widespread milestones of growing into american adulthood, and far more fiscally responsible than getting caught up in the rent race. Now you’re paying even more than it costs to ‘own’ the land that was stolen in the first place, scraping by to keep up with the monthly cycle of paying another’s mortgage, just so that you have a space to exist. Not a chance of getting ahead of the game, and as you pay off their debts, the land-'lords’ are free to invest in new ‘properties.’ The class divisions widen as the bourgeoisie’s growing wealth is mirrored by an equal and opposite enslavement of the masses.
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‘Slave’ might be a tad harsh, everyone is free to go at anytime, though it does seem to be a little tough to find a life anywhere outside of the cage. So staying put will have to work, and so will you, for your food, for your shelter, for the inherited right of existing in this made-up material world. On second thought, ‘slave’ sounds pretty freakin accurate.
And I’ve met so many that envy my nomadic life of adventure, they just wish they could do something like this, but alas, gotta stay around here and work ourselves to death so that we’ll have a decent place to die. The irony is that the place dies before you do, strangled by the sprawling fingers of civilization, and if you’d have simply gone with the wind like the other dust of the Earth, you’d be constantly finding yourself in the most amazing spaces. And if somehow everyone could lead a low impact life of mobility, we’d all live in lush gardens with plenty of breathing room, instead of living with the congestion of smog in a concrete jungle.
It’s tough though, to have any type of modern existence of moderate comfort, it’s the only way to get by really. Gotta buy-in to look at the cards you’re dealt, and we’ll shame you if you decide to fold ‘em, so you just keep throwing your money in the pot as you chase your losses down the spiraling Rabbit hole of nowhereland. And you signed a piece of paper, saying that you would provide these other pieces of paper, to be exchanged for this other piece of paper, that claims that you are in charge. (Note to self: Buy stock in Dunder-Mifflin)
You made a commitment. You’re word. You’re credit. You’re reputation. I canceled my ticket on the money train, but I know so many prospective protectors that just need to stay plugged in long enough to pay off their debt to society, and then they can make the transition into providing their positive contribution to society, the one that has been tugging at their heartstrings the whole time. Unable to be forward thinking with a negative balance on the books, they push through a life of using an ecology degree to permit the development of destruction, because the industrial complex has a far larger budget than our penniless planet does.
I understand the need to keep your word, the language of colonization is the only thing some people have, but myself, personally, if I woke up and realized that the entire system I’ve been paying into was a fraudulent facsimile of freedom, that every single step I take within its walls leaves a devastating footprint on another’s home, that the gross product of the american imagination of liberty can be tallied by the amount of murders required to make the illusion believable - if I opened my eyes and saw that my dollars were funding a genocidal regime on a mission to destroy the planet, I’m pretty sure that I could dissolve myself of any personal liability to fuel another war on the world. That’s just me though.
But the rent thing, I’m not alone on that one, and this family’s conviction to stand up to a housing crisis that’s attempting to put a new lease on every human life, is an inspiration beyond words, and an incredible reminder that humans are fully capable of living a perfectly healthy existence on this planet. We are not born to destroy. We are not born to hate. We are not born to fear. We are conditioned to be a weak society that will see no other way out, except for the flashing lights of capitalism, blinded to the obvious traps that ensnare our exodus as we meet our fate in the struggle to break free. Might be easier to chew off your leg.
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Or, what if we just stopped paying rent? What would happen if we banded together and said that enough is enough, we are unwilling to continue this madness any longer. What if we all acknowledged that the system is rigged against us, realized that our inflated population far outnumbers their one percent, and decided to stick it to the patriarch?
It’s a pretty revolutionary idea. He had mentioned a rent strike a few times, I liked the imagery that it brought up of the people coming together to topple the tyranny in a more than realistic scenario, but eventually I had to properly speculate on just what it might look like. You’d have to get a large group of people on board, otherwise they’d just arrest the squatters and squash our movement of not moving. A mobilized legion of stationary nomads.
Once it gets to be a national phenomenon, it’s easy to see the monkey wrench it will throw into the machine of primate imprisonment. The industrial apartment complex takes a big hit, as do the banks who invest in a developing world, and corporations who profit from pushing down poor people will no longer be empowered to purchase more ‘property.’
Construction will slow as the housing market collapses, scary for anyone who has adopted one of civilizations most honorable trades - building stuff bigger and better and faster and farther, or the even more prestigious task of designing the destruction themselves as an architect of our fractured future - but to anyone aware of our obvious overgrowth, this is one of the most desirable side-effects of the whole plan.
But is it really that scary when you realize that your newfound vacation time, happens to coincide with a socially acceptable movement of simply not paying the bill that had you going to work in the first place? In fact, a lot of people might stop going to work, especially those stuck in dead end jobs that suck out their soul in exchange for a roof over their cell. Beautiful. Why would we want anything else for them? Oh yeah, I guess we still need an entire working class so utterly dependent on our minimum wage, that we can force them to do the dirty work of our civilization’s seedless underbelly. To operate our invasive infrastructure. Who’s gonna pick up our garbage if they’re not trapped by our economic prison?
So now those crossing our picket fence are affected too, and the strikers are probably already creating less rubbish as they transition out of a life of waste, plus the convenient stores of low prices and low wages are no longer able to keep up the distribution of plastics, as their workforce realizes that they don’t have to toil their life away from their family in order to support them. The whole balance of power starts to shift as doors are unable to open, which only opens other ones, and we’ve begun to transition from a mindless consumer economy into a conscious community of humans, now free to give our heart away to our heart’s content.
So the corporate takeover will grind to a halt, but I’m pretty sure that would include food importation, the other primary push towards profession. So maybe people will still feel the need to work in order to feed their bellies, but between all the stops that your food makes from farm to table, it’s got a good chance of clogging an artery or two. This would be the scariest bit, especially for all of the Sardines in the city, no concept of food outside of the fast paced variety. If we aren’t prepared for this, people will panic, they will become territorial over looted food caches, and the government will try to starve us out.
So we’ll stock up, and plant as much food as we can, and without the constraints of capitalism punishment, I bet someone will be more than happy to deliver food to their community, lord knows I was. We’ll need to be there to show our family how to be strong, and that can easily be done in a community kitchen, where non-believers can experience the power of the people coming together in a good way. Plus, at least it would be on our own terms, instead of waiting on the impending shutdown of whichever catalyst is about to topple the tower, forcing us to frantically flee the deadlocked highways and falling right into their upper hands. And the reality of our changing climate is not some dream of a distant future, it is right now, and it is already responsible for a worldwide crop failure rate of over thirty percent, a statistic that is expected to drastically increase as the deadlines of mass starvation approach faster than curbside delivery.
Wouldn’t it be better to take rent control of the situation? Put them on the defensive, though I know first hand that their idea of homeland defense is quite offensive in itself. If this movement gains enough leased ground to start affecting the cash flow of the corporations who own the country, we’ll see an evolution from local police serving evictions, to the national guard declaring martial law on peaceful citizens of protest. That, I can promise you, is not conjecture, it’s what they are already doing to the few of us standing up in their face, but they absolutely cannot impose their will on a population who understand the power of the people united against evil.
I know this part of it sounds scary, I’ve been there, but unless something big happens first, we will see militarized police littering our streets in the not-so-distant future. I know to the masses I seem like a conspiracy nut, but you’re different, if these words are speaking to you, then the naivety of the mainstream flock probably isn’t. Our country is a business, and if our noncompliance to getting screwed over starts to hit their bottom line, they will use whatever force necessary to continue the profiteering. Plus, they make most of their money from military spending anyway, so at least someone gets a job security contract out of the deal. And how many of those american citizens sworn to protect, will be willing to publicly oppress little old grandmas at gunpoint for a paycheck, especially now that they don’t have to pay rent either? If enough of us stand up for what is right, they’ll have no choice but to step down.
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We really need this whole country on board to stop this damnation, but I bet that’s a tall order of organization for an entry level rent striker, so I think we should focus on a single city and use it as a template to be followed as we gain momentum. And let’s say that we can manage to find enough people fed up with the Fed, just what would those early days of the infamous rent strike revolution look like? Well, we’d stop paying rent. And we would be served eviction notices, though it might take a while to wade through all that paperwork. We’d have a legal window of freeplay before we were ousted, but then the police would try to remove us from the premises. Early on, it might not be too overwhelming for the police to handle, except maybe evicting those little old grandmas at gunpoint, though I’ve certainly seen them do that specific social atrocity first hand. But at what point is the local police force unable to process paperwork and still make time to do their actual job?
It’s not gonna take many. Who’s gonna be first though? It’s not so easy being the frontline when it means personal sacrifice for the greater good, it’s actually pretty fun though. And it’s already happening. People are currently unable to pay their rent and facing eviction, and I bet the underprivileged sure would appreciate a little support from those with the power to be heard. And as the economic bubble that we’re in bursts, if we have a plan other than blindly following the government’s directions to the nearest ‘housing camp,’ or ‘medicaid camp,’ or ‘concentration camp,’ I bet it’ll be easy to get people who can no longer afford to pay rent, to stop paying it. Once people have nothing to lose, it’ll be easy to help them win.
But the renter only has to worry about losing their deposit, it’s the home-owning land-lord that has to answer to the bank. Not much guilt about tearing down condos, but what about the independent leaser who is now on the hook to pay the price of our freedom? Certainly an important consideration, we’d be attacking a private citizen, maybe even a little old grandma, and essentially be dragging them into a fight they didn’t choose. They’d either have to cover the losses themselves, or join in on the strike.
Yeah, homeowners can now sign up too. A bit tougher to get them to hang up their concept of ownership, plus now we’re directly squaring off with the banks, so more severe penalties considering that they’re the ones behind all this madness, which is exactly why we have to dismantle the cashier cages. I know that it sounds ridiculous to think of someone risking their next twenty years of payments on some hillbilly’s boycott, but if we effectively shut down real estate and retail, the banks will be too busy drying up to notice every unpaid note.
So maybe we target ‘properties’ managed by larger entities at first, but it has to grow across the board meeting for it to work, and in the end, how can you feel bad for someone who ‘owns’ an extra home just to turn a profit on someone less privileged? I can’t accept ownership of the ground under my feet, let alone a half acre across town. And if this is enough to bankrupt them, then they were probably leaning towards joining us anyway.
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Plus, we’d have a plan, which would include community housing and infrastructure for any displaced strikers. In fact, they could stay at the next house on the docket for eviction, we all could, what if the bank guards showed up and had to toss out a hundred people from each house? Or what if ten of them were locked down like we do on pipeline excavation equipment, arms trapped in a rig that takes hours for police to cut apart? 10 people, 4 hours each, if every eviction took an entire work week, how long could they possibly keep it u